Is there an easier way to memorize the endings for Latin nouns? I've printed off D'Ooge's chart, and I carry it in my pocket, refer to it through the day, and recite them to myself without looking. Then I start reading my lessons, and I forget them all. Latin is no fun when you can't remember whether this word is nominative, accusative, dative, ablative, or genitive.

Are you following D'Ooge's course or what? Third Declension nouns are covered well as you go along and you seem to remember them very well with the exercises. What page are you up to? You should not be having any difficulties really there's no fault in his teaching at this point.

Keesa, practice, practice, practice and keep a steady course and you will get them down. There's no way to get around doing the memorization (other than not doing it), and I don't know how to make it easier, other than by various memory aids that you are no doubt familiar with. The lists of inflections shouldn't be any harder to memorize than verb conjugations, it's just their uses that are foreign to us English speakers.

The fact is that you are replying to someone who is having trouble by telling her that there is nothing wrong with the book and any fault she has is her own. This is a moronic thing to say in a learning forum, and for God's sake, D'Ooge is not this omnipotent impeccable Latin deity.

No. For I tried to memorize all declensions conjugations before. It was useless. They don't come quickly enough. That, for the sake of helping Keesa, is why I said those words. Don't make that this become an argument.

Kees, there's a fantastic, free little program called Lingua Latina for your computer that drills you on endings for both nouns and verbs... and you can choose which ones you want to drill at any given time. You can get it here:
http://www.ucc.uconn.edu/~hasenfra/wlatin.html

I find that it is very helpful because it mixes them up so that you have to really think about it.

hi keesa, when i started latin last year, a few months into it, i made a cheat-sheet of declensions and conjugations and then went onto perseus, opened up cicero or someone and tried to guess all the declensions and conjugations. you can then click on the words in perseus to see if you're right. that was more of an "immersion" technique which i found to be helpful.

i've just put my cheat-sheet onto my temporary site. i re-arranged all the declensions by gender (which i found far more helpful) and made a "verb-guesser" table based on the conjugation of esse. it's at

The m changes to an s in the plural for masculine and feminine endings. If it wasn't for the u to o change, you could say the vowels are all the same.

Also, I'm working on a word chart. Instead of just charting out the endings, I'm trying to chart out words alphabetically in all the cases. The 5th declension will be a problem because I don't I will find a fifth declension noun for every letter from A through L.